March 2017 Newsletter

As we’ve just finished a vibrant show season, spring is just around the corner and travel plans are being made as we speak. A perfect opportunity to showcase your community, attractions, downtowns, walking trails and all other amenities appealing to your future buyers. The speakers are almost complete for the Annual AARC Conference being held in Wilmington, NC Nov. 15-17. Register early for the reduced price, you won’t want to miss this year’s lineup such as Craig Lawn, Craig Lawn Associates, Industry Insights from one of the nation’s top Real Estate Sales and Marketing Professionals – Click Here to sign up or learn more

An interesting article on Brunswick County North Carolina January home sales! What’s usually a slow month for home sales proved atypical for the Brunswick County market, according to statistics released in March – Click Here to read the full article.

Sincerely,

Andre’ Nabors Chair, The AARC

Agenda is set and this year’s conference will be one of our best!

Our annual 2017 AARC Conference will be held Nov. 15-17, 2017 at the Hilton Riverfront hotel in downtown Wilmington, NC and this year’s theme is “Catch The Wave – The Retirement Wave“.

The 2017 conference will feature an expanded lineup of educational workshops, panel discussions and research presentations, headed by an all-star line-up of retiree recruitment experts, including economic development professionals, real estate developers, specialized software consultants and publishers of print and digital retirement publications.

Also on the agenda is an off-site visit to Compass Pointe, where Legacy Homes by Bill Clark is building the 2017 Ideal Home featured in Ideal Living magazine. Reception to follow, sponsored by ideal-Living.

Early Bird Sign Up starts as low as $350, don’t miss your opportunity to attend at the lowest possible rate. Visit the Sign Up Page now to assure your spot at the 2017 Annual Conference – Conference Sign Up Page

Sessions Include…

Craig Lawn, Industry Insigtes from one of the nation’s top Real Estate Sales and Marketing Professionals

Judy Randall – 25 year Travel and Tourism veteran shares her unique insights to help your team reach the next level of Travel and Tourism Marketing

Golf Courses – Turning What Some Consider a Liability Into an Asset

The Changing Club Paradigm – Membership Options for Today’s Retiree Club Member

Social Media Marketing – Today, Tomorrow and Beyond…

40 Years of Evolution – How one Retiree Home Builder Continues to Evolve

Early, Early Bird Registration is open – Visit the Conference Page to Learn More and Sign Up

See you in Wilmington, North Carolina November 2017!

Pending Home Sales Leap 5.5% in February

News Release, Realtor.com | March 29, 2017

WASHINGTON (March 29, 2017) — Pending home sales rebounded sharply in February to their highest level in nearly a year and second-highest level in over a decade, according to the National Association of Realtors®. All major regions saw a notable hike in contract activity last month.

The Pending Home Sales Index,* www.nar.realtor/topics/pending-home-sales, a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, jumped 5.5 percent to 112.3 in February from 106.4 in January. Last month’s index reading is 2.6 percent above a year ago, is the highest since last April (113.6) and the second highest since May 2006 (112.5).

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, says February’s convincing bump in pending sales is proof that demand is rising with spring on the doorstep. “Buyers came back in force last month as a modest, seasonal uptick in listings were enough to fuel an increase in contract signings throughout the country,” he said. “The stock market’s continued rise and steady hiring in most markets is spurring significant interest in buying, as well as the expectation from some households that delaying their home search may mean paying higher interest rates later this year.”

Added Yun, “Last month being the warmest February in decades also played a role in kick-starting prospective buyers’ house hunt.”

Looking ahead to the busy spring months, Yun expects to see continued ebbs and flows in activity as new supply struggles to replace listings that are going under contract at a very quick pace. This is especially the case at the lower- and mid-market price ranges, where choices are minimal and prices are being bid higher by multiple offers.

“The homes most buyers are in the market for are unfortunately the most difficult to find and ultimately buy,” said Yun. “The country’s healthy labor market is translating to greater job security, but affordability is not improving because home prices in some areas are still outpacing incomes by three times or more because of tight supply. How much new and existing inventory there is on the market this spring will determine if sales can reach their full potential and finally start reversing the nation’s low homeownership rate.”

Existing-home sales are forecast to be around 5.57 million this year, an increase of 2.3 percent from 2016 (5.45 million). The national median existing-home price this year is expected to increase around 4 percent. In 2016, existing sales increased 3.8 percent and prices rose 5.1 percent.

The PHSI in the Northeast rose 3.4 percent to 102.1 in February, and is now 6.6 percent above a year ago. In the Midwest the index jumped 11.4 percent to 110.8 in February, but is still 0.6 percent lower than February 2016.

Pending home sales in the South climbed 4.3 percent to an index of 127.8 in February and are now 4.2 percent above last February. The index in the West increased 3.1 percent in February to 97.5, but is still 0.2 percent higher than a year ago.

The National Association of Realtors®, “The Voice for Real Estate,” is America’s largest trade association, representing 1.2 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate industries.

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* The Pending Home Sales Index is a leading indicator for the housing sector, based on pending sales of existing homes. A sale is listed as pending when the contract has been signed but the transaction has not closed, though the sale usually is finalized within one or two months of signing.

The index is based on a large national sample, typically representing about 20 percent of transactions for existing-home sales. In developing the model for the index, it was demonstrated that the level of monthly sales-contract activity parallels the level of closed existing-home sales in the following two months.

An index of 100 is equal to the average level of contract activity during 2001, which was the first year to be examined. By coincidence, the volume of existing-home sales in 2001 fell within the range of 5.0 to 5.5 million, which is considered normal for the current U.S. population.

NOTE: Existing-Home Sales for March will be reported April 21, and the next Pending Home Sales Index will be April 27; all release times are 10:00 a.m. ET.

Is This The Future Of Real Estate Marketing?

R.L. Adams/Forbes Contributor, March 9, 2017

While traditional forms of marketing real estate fizzle out, a new era of digital marketing has dawned. Thanks to the global connectivity of the internet, people no longer have to turn to traditional media to market a home or condo or any other form of real estate. Gone are the days where consumers lack transparency into a market that once used to confuse and perplex everyday average individuals looking to buy or sell a home.

No. Today, consumers are savvy. As the internet has evolved, so has our unfettered access to information across the spectrum. In turn, the real estate market, which has been one of the most lucrative and profitable lines of business since the dawn of time, has seen an explosive growth of agents and owners vying for the buyer’s attention through any form of digital marketing means.

Yet, like every other highly-saturated field, it’s no longer simple to gain the customer’s awareness. They’ve learned to weed out the nuisances and cancel the noise as they search for the perfect home on the web. With fierce competition in the marketplace, potential home buyers are armed with all the data they could possibly need, forcing real estate agents to compete and set themselves apart more fortuitously than before.

The truth? It’s difficult to market a home on the internet. It’s become excruciatingly painful to set yourself apart from the fray. With the biggest players in the market aggregating themselves through sites like Zillow, Trulia and others, most have come to realize that real estate marketing is an extremely complex field that requires weaving together a number of online marketing disciplines such as blogging, social media and search engine optimization, just to name a few.

While much of this has little to do with the everyday consumer, real estate agents are constantly searching for ways they can gain an edge in digital real estate marketing. To that effect, I pondered the question for a while about the future of real estate marketing. I wondered what realtors and owners were doing to set themselves apart in such a convoluted and competitive online space.

In a recent article where I covered virtual reality’s impact on three different industries, one of those industries that I covered was real estate. The key player in that industry? Matterport. By far, this is one of the most innovative and impressive companies that I have come across and I wanted to dive in further to learn more about the product behind the company.

If you’ve never heard of Matterport, then prepare to be impressed. Their camera captures a 3D-dollhouse rendering of any space that can be toured and viewed, not only in virtual reality, but across any device. When real estate agents and home owners are looking for an edge in marketing their homes, condos, offices, yachts and anything else for that matter, they turn to Matterport.

I’m not often this impressed by a company’s product or services. I’ve not been paid to endorse them and have no deals whatsoever in place. Yet, as a digital marketing sleuth and someone who is acutely vested in the real estate industry, I am always looking for the next best thing, so to speak.

In a brief conversation with Bill Brown, CEO of the company, he informed me that “Matterport’s mission is to give people the freedom to experience any place at any time… establishing 3D and VR models as a primary medium for experiencing, sharing, and re-imagining the world.”

So to ensure that I sated my ongoing lust for information about the company’s product, I reached out. The otherwise-expensive camera that the company provides is at the center of its technology. With its previous iteration hovering around the $5,000 mark (recently reduced to $3,600), some would consider this a significant investment. So, I wanted to give a test drive on my own. I wanted to see what all this hype was about.

Matterport came through. I reached out and was connected with Sibyl Chen and Chris Hoang, who graciously shipped me a loaner camera to put the tech to firsthand use. The goal? I wanted to see just how difficult it was to capture a space in 3D. I wanted to know if this really was the cutting edge tech that lived up to all the hype. If you’ve never seen a Matterport scan or ‘flown through’ a Matterport home, then you can see a variety of examples in their gallery, here.

Chen informs me that Matterport has captured over 400,000 spaces in over 70 countries. This includes not only traditional real estate in the form of homes and condos, but also commercial real estate, hotels, retail shops, restaurants and even historical museums and other landmarks around the world. In total, these spaces have received over 100,000,000 million views. Here are some of the most interesting things that have been done with these spaces:

Real estate transactions (on homes with prices points as high as $8million)

Vacation rental bookings all over the world

Venue booking for corporate events, wedding, etc

Education of telemarketing staff on features in different hotels they “support”

Okay, before I dive into my review of the Matterport system and capturing a space in 3D that can even be viewed in virtual reality, let’s look at what real estate marketing actually is. Today, when we’re talking about real estate marketing, we’re primarily discussing online marketing in the digital realm.

For those that are acclimated to online marketing, marketing real estate is straightforward. However, it’s clearly the exception rather than the norm. The truth is that real estate marketing is difficult because online marketing is difficult. Without an established audience and platform with real authority, getting the proverbial word out is a major hurdle.

However, clearly real estate marketing isn’t just digital. Real estate agencies and realtors have been sending out direct mailers for ages and posting ads in traditional media. However, that kind of marketing is now dying off. As we complete the shift from paper to digital, traditional senses of marketing will also slowly evaporate. As more newspapers and magazines shutter, this becomes more apparent.

Today, marketing real estate isn’t about sending out direct mailers; it’s about launching email campaigns towards targeted buyers interested in homes in your area. To do that, you need an established and well-vetted list. To get that list, you need a squeeze page to attract buyers with something like a home appraisal tool or renovation tool to help them crunch some numbers in exchange for that lucrative email address.

Clearly, online marketing trumps traditional marketing in forms of both effectiveness and potential for saturation, but how do you go about marketing a home or condo on the internet? If you’re going to set yourself apart, not only do you need to understand the fundamentals and mechanics of digitally marketing real estate, but you also need to ensure you have something that accurately portrays your home.

Simply put, pictures just don’t do it anymore. Everyone knows that videos have begun springing up across realtors’ websites in an effort to better showcase a home. It’s obvious that videos help. However, today, a simple video just won’t cut it anymore, nor will great photos. Today, for realtors and prospective home owners to set themselves apart in the digital marketing fray, they need 3D models and showcases of their homes.

Why 3D Models Are Important

Humans are meant to implement all of our senses when observing an object. This is done genetically by design to perceive a threat or understand whether an object can help us to sustain life as in the form of food or to allow us to achieve some other innate goal such as provide shelter or water and so on. Up until now, the internet has largely afforded us the opportunity to use two of our senses. We can see and hear the internet in two dimensions.

While that’s great for the time being, it doesn’t provide the immersive experience that something like virtual reality can provide, especially when we can physically interact with a digital environment. Now, that doesn’t mean you need virtual reality to market real estate. However, by using 3D modeling cameras to capture a space, you can better convey it with spacial recognition and capture the entire environment and provide a walkthrough that largely replicates being physically present.

Matterport’s 3D camera capture 10 million points in space per second as it spins around, wildly stitching the environment together. When complete, the camera provides a realistic dollhouse model that anyone can fly through. It’s an impressive tool that you can add to any real estate marketing arsenal on the web.

At first glance, I was under the assumption that the camera would be far more difficult to use than it seemed. It wasn’t. The setup was simple enough. Place the camera on a tripod and turn it on. You need to sync with an iPad and download the Matterport application. Once that’s complete, you can create scans and move the camera around to stitch the entire unit together. As you move to another floor, you simply indicate that you’re adding a new floor.

The camera and software are clever enough to know when the camera has been moved too far. You need to ensure that you move it roughly 6 feet from the last point to stitch the space properly together. If the camera can’t spatially link the two scans together, you need to do it over again. Each scan takes about 15-20 seconds so mistakes can cost you some time, but once you get acclimated to its use, it goes relatively smoothly.

During my test of the system, I scanned two projects. The first was a relatively “simple,” 5-bedroom home in Beverly Hills. The second project, a massive yacht, was a little bit more challenging. The only issue that I had during the scans occurred while scanning the stairs and stitching together one floor with the next. However, after a few tries, I got it down.

My goal in conducting the scans was to do one that was super-simple and one that was highly complex. For the complex scan, I used Howard Leight’s yacht in Marina del Rey, aptly coined, Leight Star. Howard Leight is the billionaire founder of an intelligent hearing solutions business, a company that was long-ago acquired by Honeywell. Leight is also a prodigious real estate investor and owner of Malibu Rocky Oaks, a winery in Malibu often featured on some of the most influential Instagram accounts.

This was the second scan that I tried and for good reason. The scan of the yacht was far more complex than the home. But I figured if I could scan the most complex type of space, with the most abundance of light, then I could really master the system. It was nowhere nearly as good as the other scan that exists for another superyacht in Matterport’s gallery called the Aurora Yacht, but I came pretty darn close for a novice.

Overall, out of the box, the system was simple and easy to use. Once the data was loaded onto the camera, all you have to do is upload it to Matterport’s servers, where they process the files into the 3D dollhouse scan, which you can easily embed in a WordPress post, giving anyone with a blog or website to market their real estate online simply and effectively.

R.L. Adams is a software engineer, serial entrepreneur, and author. He runs a wildly-popular blog called Wanderlust Worker and contributes to Entrepreneur, Engadget and the Huffington Post.

55+ housing market: full speed ahead

Experts see continued growth in the sector

James Limbach/Consumer Affairs, January 16, 2017

Industry experts attending the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) International Builders’ Show in Orlando, Fla., expect the 55+ housing market will continuing growing in the years ahead.

“We know, anecdotally, over the past few years that the 55+ housing market has been growing and is likely to continue to grow for the next decade, and now we have new numbers that back that up,” said Paul Emrath, NAHB’s vice president of survey and housing policy research. “The return of 55+ data — now included in the American Community Survey — will not only show us the size of the entire group of 55+ households, but also will give us information about individual markets, and how they are currently accommodating that growing segment.”

In addition, Emrath says, builder confidence has increased over the past several years. “NAHB’s 55+ Single-Family Housing Market Index, which is based on a survey of members that measures builder and developer confidence for that market, regularly posted year-over-year gains from 2012 through 2015, and has remained in a very positive position through 2016, with third-quarter reports of sales and current traffic posting increases from the previous year.”

Aging boomers fuel the market

As the boomer generation ages, many are looking for a smaller home — one that’s the right size, with a floor plan that makes single-level living possible, but with space for visiting family members and entertaining friends.

“Older home owners, in recent years, have been able to sell their large homes in the suburbs and buy an energy-efficient right-sized home, often in walkable communities with a wealth of opportunities for activities and social engagement,” said Jim Chapman, chairman of NAHB’s 55+ Housing Industry Council. “Downsizing 55+ buyers do their research — they know what they want and don’t want to settle for less.”

However, Chapman warns that not every 55+ household is positioned to buy into such communities, so it’s important that local jurisdictions plan to address the growing need for affordable rental housing for seniors as well.

A Washington, D.C., reporter for more than 30 years, Jim Limbach covers the federal agencies for ConsumerAffairs. Previously, he was a reporter and news anchor for Associated Press Broadcast Services, where he covered business and consumer news as well as space shots and other major spot news events.